pixels of paradise

image & croyance // image & belief

DATAZONE

In Salle 7 of the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Liège Philippe Chancel presents a selection from his photographic series in progress Datazone. Philippe Chancel’s work is also presented in the exhibition IDOLES in Cité Miroir.

Genuine “work in progress”, Datazone is a remarkable series in Philippe Chancel’s work. Five “destinations” are brought together: North Korea, the Emirates, Kabul, Port-au-Prince, Fukushima…

What can photography still express about our world? Does it still have that personal power that it used to possess to reveal the forging of identities and thus display the unknown side of contemporary cultures? This kind of belief has to be apprehended almost like ethics, a pursuit that one might consider desperate as our daily lives and even our imagination are now taken over by visual images, so abundant that we hardly notice them anymore.

Philippe Chancel opposes disillusionment with enthusiasm, an energy that every explorer needs. Whether with regard to the omnipresent authoritarian regime in North Korea, the caricatural ultra capitalism in Dubai or disasters hyped by the media, Philippe Chancel presents accurate detailed images, stripped of stylistic effects and poses.

As such, Datazone originates in an anthropology of globalization. (excerpts from a text by Adrien Chevrot and Damien Sausset)